Innovator Interview with Tony Wong

About project management, leadership, and Point Man System. Insights into a way of getting things done on time, within budget, scope, and…with a confidence and a peace of mind.

by CK Lin, Director of CoGi (Convergence of Global Innovators) and Tony Wong, founder of Digital Onion

Add comment July 20th, 2009

My Personal Life Mission

I attended a CEOFlow/Nitro.la CEO gathering last Friday at Fina Ventures in Santa Monica, CA. During our conversation, several CEO’s expressed interest in my personal life mission and how I created my company around that mission. So I just emailed them several docs which included My Personal Life Mission. Since they were interested in reading it, I thought others might be interested too. So here it is:

Like everyone I want my life to count. I want my life to be useful. I want my life to have purpose.

Somewhere through my career working on large, high-profile, Fortune 100 software projects, I realized that my work wasn’t contributing to other people’s lives. It wasn’t useful and it definitely didn’t provide me a sense of purpose in life. And so like everyone else, I began my search for “what I wanted to do with my life.”

Luckily, I soon found an answer. Not just any answer but an answer that had longevity; an answer that I was sure was the answer. Through years of asking the question, “What do I want to do with my life?” and getting the same answer back, I made a life commitment. I took a stand for what I was going to do with my life. I made a commitment to Create a World
that Works.

From there, I set out to structure all aspects of my life around this mission. For American men, one of the most critical aspects of our lives is our work (because we typically connect our identity and even our value as a human to our work). So I made sure my job reflected this. And for me, the best way to do this was to create my own company around my mission. My company mission reads, “Lead the industry with project management systems that produce extraordinary teams that produce extraordinary results.” It’s from here that my company
was created.

For us, it’s about transforming how people and teams work together. By transforming the way they do business and how they interact with each other, we see that we can ultimately change how we interact with each other in all areas of our lives. We see the possibility of a world that works. A world where people simply keep their agreements, take responsibility for their own actions and are accountable to each other. Can you imagine a world like that? It may not be world peace, but it’d be damn close. It’d be… wow, just extraordinary.

We can see that this can all work. We can achieve great things if we all work together and believe it can be done. We can do this effortlessly without the back stabbing, politics, second-guessing, domination, manipulation. It can be joyful, effortless and ultimately fulfilling in knowing that you are creating a new reality – a reality where the world fulfills its potential to be fully functioning, people working together to achieve extraordinary things. A World that Works- the way we always knew it could.

And so this is worth it to me. This is worth dedicating my life doing.

A client of ours put it best when she said,

“The principles and philosophies Digital Onion imbues are unique. They definitely like to remember that life is to be enjoyed. They want to make project management better to make

Add comment March 16th, 2009

The Green Mindset

I write this piece as I think about the similarities between the Green Environmental movement and what’s happening in the US and Global economies. I don’t believe in coincidences so I though there must be a connection and I found that there is.

The following is what I see happening not only in our physical environment but also in our economic environment. In fact, it’s happening all around us because the cause of these things comes from the same place – our individual and collective thoughts.

We must recognize that who we have been, especially as Americans, has created the world around us.

Is it a coincidence that our environment is suffering to the extent that it is – with the air, land and sea in the state that it is AND simultaneously, we are all suffering through the greatest economic tragedy since The Great Depression? NO.

I don’t believe in coincidences of this magnitude. Why? Because I see the same modalities; the same mindsets that led us to do the things that we did – dump trash and toxic waste into our oceans, spew dirt, chemicals and smoke into our atmosphere so recklessly that it created a hole in the ozone as large as the Asian continent are the same ones that led us to overspend, overextend our finances and to create the oppressive, dominating, greed producing business organizations that eventually led us to our current financial demise.

What we have now is an individual, societal and business disaster! This disaster is at all levels and all facets of who we are as humans on this planet called earth. And we’ve created it for ourselves. There’s no one to blame except us humans.

Our greed, our unnatural, forced ways of being. Our modalities of excess where nothing is ever enough. Our ego, our desires, our attachments to material goods all led us to where we are today. In Zen Buddhism, we refer to this as the Hungry Ghost- an emaciated creature with an extended belly that is packed full of desires, attachments, power, greed etc.

Now the ironic part of all this, is that many of us are finding that we sought after those materialistic, ego-centric things in the pursuit of achieving the what we really wanted – camaraderie, community, friendship, space, clarity, peace, happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment, love, joy, aliveness.

We somehow misguidedly thought that those things – the hamster wheel running and buying, buying, buying and getting more status, a better job, a bigger title etc.- would somehow get us the things that we really want. But in reality, doing those things have nothing to do with camaraderie, community, friendship, space, clarity, peace, happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment, love, joy, aliveness.

I often use this analogy in consulting with my clients. It’s as if you’re trying to stop the water from filling up a leaky boat by plugging all the leaks while ignoring the fact that you have a crazy shipmate with a pickaxe punching more holes in the bottom of the boat that you can never plug up. The point to my clients is that stopping leaks is… stopping leaks.

Leaks are often just the symptoms of a disease. You gotta get to the root cause aka disease if you’re gonna really find a solution.

With our thoughts, we create our world. – the Buddha

Here’s the upside. Our future has the possibility of being green all around- out there and in here!

Since it was our thoughts that led to our actions that created the situation we’re in now, it will be our thoughts that lead to our actions that will create the future we’ll be in tomorrow.

I call this possibility of a new workable future – a world that works- the Green Mindset Movement. Because our future starts and ends with us- with us taking the right action and moving forward together, our future is an open possibility.

Here’s another analogous thing about the Green Environmental Movement and what I call the Green Mindset Movement.

Most of us that support the “green movement” don’t have a specific vision of how we want our world to be. We just know that we must produce less trash, recycle plastic and paper, use less gasoline. But to what end? Less waste? Yes. Use less fossil fuels? Yes. But to what end? What does our ideal environment look like? In my travels amongst the yuppie business elite, I have yet to hear of a specific vision of what we’re trying to make our world look like. How about “green?” Yes, it sounds like a big “duh” but from a certain standpoint, it isn’t.

The environment we all seek and unconsciously yearn for is one filled with green things like grass, trees, bushes, plants… We want our environment to be much closer to how it naturally occurs if nature were left alone. Now if you can picture that environment and I mean, really picture it. SEE IT. See yourself in that environment with grass, trees, brush and lots of it. Now look around. What else do you SEE? Or… what don’t you see? Maybe it will help if you experience yourself in that environment. What do you feel? Or… again like the seeing, what don’t you feel? Can I suggest that what you don’t feel and see is the stuff that’s in our current environment, our current world. You don’t see concrete walls, plaster, paint and the glass boxes that most of us corporate people work in. You don’t see asphalt and cars slotted into cramped parking spaces. You don’t feel or see oversized, supersized American Costco shopping carts rushing towards you. You probably don’t envision this:

You don’t see or feel any of that do you? So what do you see and feel? Nothing. Or more closely, you see and experience space… yes, space. A little more breathing room. Aaah, imagine that. Imagine standing in a field of grass surrounded by trees without the distractions of email, cell phone, office phone, people standing in front of your desk waiting for you…(I actually just had someone come to my desk waiting for me to look up as I wrote this.) Isn’t this what we all are yearning for? Just some space? Some physical space away from all the concrete, glass and steel? From what I hear from people, the answer is definitively a yes.

Here’s the connection again. This is exactly the same thing we all need and want in our personal lives. Some space. Some breathing room from the hamster wheel. Now more than ever, many of us want relief from the mountains of debt and bills that were generated from our excesses of the past several years, decade or decades. Like I wrote before, I don’t believe in coincidences. It’s no coincidence that what we yearn for in our physical environment is the same thing we yearn for in our personal lives. And so it’s no coincidence that that what our business and work environments need and yearn for is also space, peace, quiet, less rather than more etc. This is where I see the direct tie-in between the Green Environment Movement and what I call the Green Mindset Movement. This movement is also needed in the work place. It’s a “greenification” of the unworkable – and in a sense unnatural systems and structures that led us to where our businesses and economy is today.

In my next post, I’ll give you an example of how this plays out in my business. Let me know what you think of this. Thanks

1 comment March 13th, 2009